


The Curious Incident

by plumedy



Category: Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: ACD Canon References, Bell's A+ Serious Behaviour, Cream Is Ignored, Dogs, Friendship, Gen, Hound of the Baskervilles, Humor, Life Is Stranger Than Fiction, Poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-11
Updated: 2013-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-11 13:04:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/pseuds/plumedy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doyle eats poisoned apple jam,  listens to Bell's stories and remembers everything he knows about the physics of electricity and St. Elmo's fire. And he has no idea where the dog came from.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Curious Incident

Ridiculously enough, I was poisoned. Ordered to bed rest by Bell, I lay under a heavy blanket; I was weak and miserable.

It was then that I discovered just how fluid things were. Fever was not something elemental and omnipotent – in fact, with due effort it could be combated. To do this I needed to stay in the borders of cold logic.

After some hours of practice I was able to acknowledge the fact that it is not normal for an old walnut chair to turn into a giant herring. That was, undoubtedly, a sign of some progress, but I was exhausted to the point where a herring didn’t differ from a chair all that much. My world was giving at the seams, and all the objects threatened to fall apart in a cloud of iridescent butterflies.

And so I was immensely grateful when a moment later a strangely cold palm touched my forehead, wiping the sweat off – it suddenly provided me with a sensation to focus my attention on, something that could hold everything together.

“Bell,” I murmured happily, not yet entirely sure how to pronounce words, “I- I know how not to believe in delirium.”

The room was silent for a moment, so silent that, knowing how close to me he must've been, I doubted if he was breathing at all.

“Do you, now,” he said in an exasperated voice. “I must note that you picked an unfortunate time for your logical exercitations. Feeling any better?”

He had been painfully nice to me ever since I had had the bad luck of eating that apple jam and collapsing on the floor of his flat. I suspected that he felt guilty for what had happened to me. He would turn up every day at the same time most dutifully, check my temperature, the colour of my sclerae and mucous membrane, feed me something and sit beside – I didn’t count, but it felt like three or four hours. Sometimes he brought his notes and worked on them. He seemed to understand that talking to me fed my delirium, and so he mostly remained silent; but sometimes I couldn’t bear the lack of any physical focus, and so I asked him to tell me something, anything, just to hear his voice.

And he would tell me stories, long stories of human lives, some of them known to nobody but him – often so surreal that I had to ask him if he wasn’t thinking them up. With faint amusement distinct in his intonation he informed me that _he_ wasn’t the kind of person to make up events that never happened. “Life,” he added, “is – but you know – often stranger than fiction.”

At first the world around me was darkness most of the time, because it was hard for me to keep my eyes open. Light hurt them, even when coming from behind the curtains. Apparently he realized that, as well; and I think that he understood my need for sensory irritants. Once he did a most amazing thing: he took me by the wrist, as if checking the pulse, and started swaying my hand ever so slightly.

“Ay, I know,” he explained when I finally made up my mind to open my eyes and stare at him, “the focus of attention.”

 

I don’t know how I ended up sheltering a dog. I really don’t.

What I know is that it was there a week later, when my fever subdued and I was able to walk properly. It stood in my corridor and looked at me with a pair of yellow unblinking eyes.

I stared back. I hated to admit it, but I had not a slightest clue as to where it came from.

The dog yawned and sat on the floor, shaking its narrow sly muzzle. I wanted to rebel against such unceremonious behaviour, but suddenly the way its velvety ears swayed seemed vaguely familiar, and then the realization dawned upon me. As if in a faint mist, wild recollections of the preceding day floated around me; and I could only contemplate them in dumb amazement. Now I remembered the never-ending yawl outside, and how I had climbed out of the bed, too inebriated with fever to be cautious, and gone to find the source of the sound. The storm had been raging in the streets. That had been the kind of weather of which they say that it is possible to “stumble against the wind”.

I had seen it immediately upon opening the door – it stood on my staircase, a black slender predator with its eyes the colour of that poisoned apple jam. There had been St. Elmo's lights dancing upon its lank chestnut fur.

Doubtful, I regarded the real dog in front of me with a critical glance. It looked suspiciously normal.

That must’ve been fever, I decided, remembering bits and pieces of my knowledge about the physics of electricity. The dog definitely wasn’t sharp and its height, as far as I could see, was nowhere near sixteen feet. But then I also remembered that there were cases when the lights appeared on grass and leaves; and perhaps my memories weren’t that implausible after all, daemonic though the image might be (apparently being feverish made me foolhardy).

I walked forward and stretched my hand towards it; it smelled at my fingers quite indifferently, turned around and walked back into the darkness.

 

I still had not decided what to do with the dog when Bell came around with his usual examination procedure. It behaved very decently, didn’t trouble me and was very quiet, as if knowing that its fate depended upon it. In fact, it spent most of the day outside and came back only in the late evening.

The Doctor sat down, put his fingertips together and started to recount the latest news to me when it walked into the room and stopped, staring at him.

He stopped short and glanced at it sideways.

“Pray explain this, Doyle,” said he and narrowed his eyes. Audible silence reigned. Finally the Doctor sprang to his feet and folded his arms on his chest, momentarily looking half a foot taller.

“I take it that you can consider yourself avenged,” he said vehemently. For some reason it provoked in me a fit of silly laughter. Thanks to my sore throat, I couldn’t laugh loudly, and that was a blessing; for I suspected that he wouldn’t have been pleased to see that inappropriate paroxysm of merriment. I buried my face in the pillow, trying not to look at the poor dog.

“What is this chap doing here anyway?..”

“It’s a girl,” corrected I in a suspiciously unsteady voice. “It just took your cane.”

“It did _what_?”

He turned around sharply and, indeed, stumbled across the dog, which held his cane in its teeth. It gave him a most unperturbed look and blinked a couple of times.

Bell eyed me furiously and attempted to take the cane away – to no avail: the dog simply reeled its head and took a step back. It was obviously in a mood to play.

“Down!” commanded the Doctor in his best dog-training voice. “Give it back.”

It tilted its head and did nothing.

“You can chase it around the room,” offered I.

“Not effective,” he objected thoughtfully, putting a finger to his lips. After some moments of silence I saw a smile of gloating delight spreading across his face. “Ah, but I know how to retrieve it. Only I don’t think the solution will be to your liking.”

Nonplussed and amused, I watched how he walked towards my chair, took my top hat and returned to the dog. Then I suddenly understood what he was up to, but it was too late to stop him, and I could only look at him waving my hat in front of the dog who gradually became more and more agitated; it clearly wanted to have the hat but had no idea how to accomplish that without letting go of the cane.

“Here,” purred Bell, “see this? Want to take it?”

The dog yelped, bothered by such mockery.

“All is fair, lass: I give this to you and you return the one you're holding to me. Deal?”

It still struggled with the temptation, but the promise was too much for it; and, when he lifted the hat and threw it across the room, the dog dropped the cane and jumped towards the hat instead.

 “Now you can do whatever you want with it,” the Doctor informed it serenely. “Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas.”

He adroitly picked his cane up, wiping it with a handkerchief, and studied the marks left by the dog’s teeth with an expression of the liveliest curiosity.

“You know, Doyle: the shape and size of such marks carry a lot of interesting information. I could deduce the breed and the size of your dog even if I never saw it.”

“Next time I’ll give it to some other animal and ask you to deduce the breed,” grumbled I. “Could you deduce the species of a wolf given the marks left by its teeth? And, by God, I’ll name this dog Josephine if you don’t stop grinning.”

 


End file.
